In this article, I will explain how and why to add an intra-site search engine to your AbanteCart store.

If you have a barebones website with products only, this article does not apply to you as AbanteCart's built-in search engine is most likely meeting your search needs.

Now, if you have a website with lots of information pages such as a library or a resources section pointing to pages within your website, please read on.

As is, AbatenCart's search engine only picks up products and category pages; it does not crawl and index additional information pages you may have added to your store. In my website, for example, I have a library with loads of articles and other resources, both inbound and outbound. Of course, I made these resources available for my customers so there would be no point in having them unless they can be found.

When I decided to add an intra-site search engine to my website, I searched for several options on the market, including Google Search. Finally, I decided to settle with Zoom Search Engine since it's the one that best meets my needs. Zoom is simple, powerful, and flexible. It has no recurring fees and if you have a small website, it's totally free!

An intra-site search engine is easy to set up. In the case of Zoom, I downloaded it to my desktop, configured the settings to my needs, then put the crawler in auto mode. Depending on the size of your website, it may take over 24 hours to crawl the entire site. This is pretty normal. Once you are done with crawling, you simply upload the data files, search.php, settings.php and search_template.html to your server.

As you go about looking for an intra-site search engine, check to make sure the developer offers tech support and what kinds of features it includes.